REVISIONS; Tales of Power, Pride and Prejudice, and a Certain Pig

Politics has made the spectacle of human behavior very distasteful in recent days, and though none of it should be ignored, some of it must be put at a distance for at least some of the time.

So I have sought escape in the world of animal fables and animation, gazing at old MGM and Warner Brothers cartoons on cable television, following nightly episodes of ''The Simpsons,'' watching ''Babe'' on video and then going to the theater to see the sequel, ''Babe: Pig in the City,'' where I sat across the aisle from a small boy who cried ''Ouch! Ouch!'' every time something painful or frightening happened.

There is no pain that can't be turned to pleasure in those old cartoons where pigs, rabbits, ducks, crows and foxes have at one another with no pretense of motive beyond natural law, cheerful spite and the love of trickery. Writing about Walt Disney in 1934, the art critic Erwin Panofsky said that cartoons had all the elements of folklore -- ''sadism, pornography, the humor engendered by both, and moral justice'' -- which they turned into variations on the David and Goliath theme, ''the triumph of the seemingly weak over the seemingly strong.'' Quite cathartic in their way, and exactly the principles at work in full-length animation spectacles like ''Antz'' and ''A Bug's Life.''

Things often get kinder, gentler and duller when humans enter the picture. But one of the pleasures of ''The Simpsons,'' and clearly one of the reasons the show gets away with its blithe-spirit satire of American life, is the fact that the family members look as though someone combined the physical traits of several species, primate and otherwise, to make them. Cartoons wouldn't exist without caricature and expressionism, but those qualities are usually matched by the extreme situations the characters trip, stumble, swagger and fall into. That's not true here. We are in the land of ''It's a Wonderful Life''; but there is no angel to intervene, and nothing has turned out the way Frank Capra planned.

Where else in television sitcoms post Archie Bunker and Roseanne will you find such jaunty acknowledgment of greed, sloth, earnest ineptitude and cheerful selfishness among family and friends in the workplace, the schools and the home? Along with good intentions, reconciliations and (for a little while at least) cheerful endings. Why not? Life can supply these, too, and comedy demands them.

When ''The Simpsons'' was first broadcast in 1989, it was fun to say that the smartest, cheekiest sitcom on television was a cartoon. Now it's pretty depressing. In short-range terms, I'd love to see what the show would do with the forthcoming Senate impeachment trial. Long range, I'd like to see what would happen if a television show that starred actual rather than animated human beings risked doing what ''The Simpsons'' already does.

I'm almost embarrassed to say how much I liked the ''Babe'' movies, with their fusion of real people, real animals, animatronic animal doubles and animation. And I'm appalled that ''Babe: Pig in the City'' is a failure at the box office in part because adults seem to think it is too dark for their children. Is it any darker than ''Bambi'' or ''Dumbo''? If adults don't want to go with children, then they ought to go themselves. I did. ''The Simpsons'' invites grown-ups to talk about satire; ''Babe'' and ''Babe: Pig in the City'' are fables that make us talk about sentiment and morality.

When Paramount first made cartoons based on ''Aesop's Fables'' in the 1920's, five animals arranged themselves around a logo that read ''sugar-coated pills of wisdom.'' But for all their pills of wisdom, their declarations about the virtues of an unprejudiced heart, of courage and loyalty, their praise of how a pig -- that most low-caste of animals -- sought identity, community and love in the world of animals and humans, the ''Babe'' movies tap real emotion, not just sentiment. They are filled with stories about power, pride and prejudice, both inter- and intra-species. The city that Babe must travel to in order to help save his beloved Farmer Hoggett's land is a place of shysters, lowlife entertainers, thugs and beggars.

And that's just the animals. The humans are even more threatening and considerably more shallow, especially those who fail to acknowledge that they are bound to animals by respect as well as by need or greed.

(Is there a political fable tucked in here somewhere? Yes, as a matter of fact. Both movies are anti-colonialist, more subtly but just as surely as Orwell's ''Animal Farm'' is anti-totalitarian.)

I haven't read the Dick King-Smith book that inspired ''Babe,'' but I can say that as movies the ''Babes'' have a leisurely expansiveness and a way of framing episodes that comes from novels. You will think of E. B. White; of both ''Charlotte's Web'' and ''Stuart Little.''

But you will think of Dickens, too, in some of the darker city scenes, where cruelty, innocence and caricature push up against one another with real violence.

Of course, children, along with dissenting or disenfranchised adults, love animal fables. When you cannot make yourself understood by people with power over you, you might as well belong to another species. Their laws and pronouncements make little or no sense to you, but unless you can outwit them, you must obey.